Radio and Television
It was Bendix's appearance in The McGuerins of Brooklyn, playing a rugged blue-collar man, that led to his most famous role. Producer and creator Irving Brecher saw Bendix as the perfect personification of Chester A. Riley, giving a second chance to a show whose audition failed when the sponsor spurned Groucho Marx for the lead. With Bendix stumbling, bumbling, and skating almost perpetually on thin ice, stretching the patience of his otherwise loving wife and children, The Life of Riley was a radio hit from 1944 through 1951, and Bendix brought an adaptation of the film version to Lux Radio Theater. He made Riley's frequent exclamation, "What a revoltin' development this is," into a national catchphrase.
Bendix wasn't able to play the role on television at first—a contracted film commitment prevented it. The role went to Jackie Gleason and the show aired a single season beginning in October 1949. Despite winning an Emmy award, the show ended, in part because Gleason wasn't entirely acceptable as Riley when Bendix was so identified with it on radio. But Bendix was available for a new television version in 1953, and this time the show clicked. The second television version of The Life of Riley ran from 1953 to 1958—long enough for Riley to become a grandfather.
On the 1952 television program This Is Your Life, it was claimed that he was a descendant of the 19th century composer Felix Mendelssohn.
In 1958 Bendix played the lead in Rod Serling's The Time Element, a time-travel adventure about a man who travels back to 1941 Honolulu and tries to warn everyone about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor.
In 1958 Bendix appeared on NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford. He returned for a second appearance on October 1, 1959, the fourth season premiere of the series in which he and his friend, Tennessee Ernie Ford, perform a comedy skit about a safari.
In 1960 Bendix starred in seventeen episodes of the NBC western series Overland Trail in the role of Frederick Thomas "Fred" Kelly, the crusty superintendent of the Overland Stage Company. Doug McClure, later Trampass on NBC's The Virginian, co-starred as his young understudy, Frank "Flip" Flippen. The program was similar to another offering on ABC the following season, Stagecoach West.
Read more about this topic: William Bendix
Famous quotes containing the words radio and, radio and/or television:
“Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall.”
—Max Lerner (b. 1902)
“Now they can do the radio in so many languages that nobody any longer dreams of a single language, and there should not any longer be dreams of conquest because the globe is all one, anybody can hear everything and everybody can hear the same thing, so what is the use of conquering.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)